1. Field
An exemplary embodiment of this invention relates to the field of the detection of Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) systems. More specifically an exemplary embodiment of the invention relates to a method and a system capable of extracting the location of the car number-plate from a series of 2-D images, using a device equipped with a camera of any kind.
2. Description of the Related Art
There are many known devices that are able to detect the location of the number plate of a car and then recognize the plate-number producing at the output an alphanumeric text corresponding to the characters of the plate number.
There are many approaches for performing car-plate detection and recognition. Most of these systems are based on a Personal Computer to carry out the required processing tasks. In such systems a video digitizer samples the camera sensor and a PC, which runs the car-plate detection and recognition software, then processes the data. However these implementations are not easily portable, are bulky in size, require special power-supply and are difficult to install on site.
When ANPR systems are used for recognizing plates of moving cars in highway roads, another important characteristic is the recognition speed. In order to be able to catch fast-moving cars, the plate detector must be able to analyze very fast every frame in the video sequence. The detection speed depends on the algorithm and the processor speed. Today's common processors or even dedicated digital signal processor (DSP) devices are not able to deliver the required performance.